Tag: Software Development (Page 1 of 16)

The Must-Haves of Our Skillset

July 13, 2020 / Tom

When I decided that I was going to commit the journey of my career to building solutions on WordPress, I was – at the time – all in. That is to say that HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL were at a place where I could stay involved with all of them and work competently down the stack as needed for whatever it is I was building.

But as both my family [and I] have grown and as WordPress has changed over the past half-decade (let alone decade), that entire perspective has changed.

Not just that, though.

I’ll Share My Code With Images

May 28, 2020 / Tom

For as long as I’ve been writing on this site, I’ve used a combination of syntax highlighting, GitHub gists, or code or pre tags to help share code relevant to a given post.

But the more technical articles I read and the more that I see we, as an entire industry, start to rely versus utilize tools of Stack Overflow and other sites, the more I wonder how much we really understand what we’re writing (or even care) so long as the end results just works.

This isn’t a commentary on how quickly we should ship something. Instead, it’s about how we solve a given problem while also truly learning what it is that we’re incorporating into our codebase.

Don’t Develop Development Tunnel Vision

April 23, 2020 / Tom

In previous posts, I’ve talked about the idea of focusing on an area and going deep rather than wide. This is personal preference, of course, but it’s mine, nonetheless.

Over the last year, though, one of the byproducts that I’ve found is the longer you stay in a given industry, the more common certain problems become. (This shouldn’t come as a surprise as this is precisely why we have design patterns.)

But the thing about doing this is that you develop a sort of tunnel vision for ways to solve problems.

Case in point: Recently, I was tasked with needing to develop some functionality that was going to parse markup and convert it into a slightly different format.

A Case for Building Web Applications on WordPress

May 30, 2019 / Tom

The content of this post is essentially the text version of the talk that I recently gave at WordCamp Atlanta 2019. Sure, some parts are left out, and some parts are modified but I do that since this is a different medium and certain statements or examples don’t translate as well. 🙃

The purpose of the talk, as you can tell from the title, is presenting a case for building web applications with WordPress.

I believe it can be done – because I’ve seen it done and worked with teams who do it – but before actually looking into the reasons why I think it’s a good foundation for certain applications, I also want to clarify terminology that we toss around a bit.

Ultimately, I want to define my terms so there isn’t any confusion, and then I want to use said terms to move forward.

But enough of the setup, right? Here’s the content of the talk.

A Misaligned View: Prioritizing Peers Over Users

May 14, 2019 / Tom

How many times have you looked at someone’s code and stated:

I’m not using this because it doesn’t look well-written.

And in this case, “look well-written” might either be a substitute for:

“look like how I would write it,”
“seem to make sense to me.”

Sure – there are times where using open source code is risky. We know this from the various software and services that show up with vulnerabilities. But, at least for this post, treat those as the exception – not the rule.

This means we’re left with looking at something we may use but opt not to use because it doesn’t seem to be written in a way that we think it should be written.